Christmas 2013: Trifle with tradition at your peril

Christmas customs are the leftovers of the sacred, which is why they are so
important to maintain

Each family has its own Christmas traditions. For instance, every year Himself insists on making bread sauce from scratch. He steeps, he stirs, he crumbs, he cloves. After hours of infinite pains, the bread sauce always looks like wallpaper paste. For all I know, it tastes like wallpaper paste, but we will never find out. You see, the time-honoured fate of Himself’s bread sauce is that it gets forgotten or lost under a pile of cracker debris or an oven glove discarded at the height of the parsnip frenzy. Not Eating the Bread Sauce is a key component of our Christmas, a tradition more honoured in the breach than in the observance, but much loved none the less.

Why doesn’t Himself stop making the bread sauce if no one eats it, a rational Dawkins type might ask. Why do we keep stuffing stockings full of silly gifts when the children are taller than us? Why does a grandmother I know fake Santa footprints in icing sugar and make reindeer poo out of coconut and chocolate? Why did one colleague Skype from Kenya two years ago to join in her family’s hotly contested game of Articulate, complete with engraved cup for the winner? Because it’s traditional, isn’t it? Traditions are both honourable and illogical.

Take my Christmas trifle. Every Christmas Eve, I make a trifle whose sole purpose is not to be a delicious dessert, but a general object of mirth and derision. The one thing to be said for my trifle is that, no matter how much you eat, the trifle stays the same size. Here is a riddle to confound a Cambridge particle physicist: if six people have helpings of trifle on Christmas Day, why, when you look in the fridge the next morning, is the volume of the trifle exactly as it was before?

Like primeval slime, the trifle slurps and slithers back into position. “Mummy’s trifle is the same as the Little Porridge Pot,” said the Daughter when she was so small she was still in her Tripp-Trapp chair. “It never runs out.”

Thus, the annual Miracle of the Trifle must be re-enacted. The truth is, I make the trifle because I remember being a child myself and going to the fridge at night and dipping a surreptitious finger into the bottom of my mother’s superb sherry trifle. By Boxing Day, sponge fingers, fruit cocktail and Harvey’s Bristol had coalesced into a paste of paradisiacal unctousness. I hated fresh cream, and it was forbidden to dig out the trifle’s cakey base, but the blessed Bird’s custard concealed my crime.

Is there any family that doesn’t have a seasonal food fetish? A neighbour still serves fresh fish on Christmas Eve, honouring her Italian great-grandparents who used to keep a carp in the bath. Every December, my friend Miranda makes Delia’s Creole Christmas Cake, which requires a full week of marinating and shaking. “It always goes to the chickens,” she laughs.

Naturally, there can be no question of discontinuing the unloved Creole cake. Ditto the star that Miranda made, Blue-Peter style, for the top of the tree when she was first married 20 years ago. Gold tinsel wrapped round green garden wire, the star now looks less like a celestial summons to see the baby Jesus and more like a clump of dried seaweed. Each Christmas, Miranda’s husband suggests that he might buy a new star for the tree. A ridiculous idea. Each year, the family says no.

What does this quasi-religious observance of rituals and relics signify? According to a poll for BBC Good Food Magazine, almost four in 10 Britons admitted that they only ate turkey because it was traditional, while 14 per cent said they would not dare change it “for fear of upsetting family members”. This Christmas, 62 per cent of us will enjoy a traditional turkey dinner, although Christmas pudding is endangered, with only 54 per cent saying they like the rich 14th-century dessert.

Like? What on earth has liking anything got to do with Christmas? It’s traditional, you wimpy wets! Thank goodness Brussels sprouts are just about holding their own, with 64 per cent saying the evil green bullets will feature on their festive table. This season, Waitrose made a well-meaning but entirely wrong-headed decision to sell a sweeter, “child-friendly” variety.

Brussels sprouts should not be friendly to either child or adult. That is their traditional function. Like Islamic fundamentalists, sprouts are a common enemy around which the British people can rally. As for the decision by millions of us to keep setting fire to a claggy, artery-clogging, indigestion-inducing steamed fruit pudding… well, the heart has its raisins.

Prof Richard Dawkins, that evangelist of godlessness, insists: “If children understand that beliefs should be substantiated with evidence, as opposed to tradition, authority, revelation or faith, they will automatically work out for themselves that they are atheists.”

I bet Dawkins is a bundle of laughs in his white beard and his fluffy red fatsuit, saying No No No! instead of Ho Ho Ho! He thinks that tradition misleads. On the contrary, it is one of our few reliable guides in an age when signposts are sorely lacking. “Do this in remembrance of me,” Christ said, referring to bread and wine. In some sense, every Christmas tradition is an act of remembrance, a way of investing meaning and joy in life, which will go on being meaningful and joyful to our children and their children long after we are gone.

It’s there in the familiar baubles we hang on the tree. It’s delving into the decorations’ box and finding the misshapen pottery plates and wonky angels your kids made for you, which are utterly useless and must never ever be discarded. It’s crying when A Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols from King’s is on the radio, and not just because you’re chopping onions for the stuffing. It’s In the Bleak Midwinter. It’s the hopes and fears of all the years are met in thee tonight.

In our house, it’s a well-loved male figure in a pinny stooping over the stove stirring his breadcrumbs in milk. “Mustn’t forget the bread sauce, must we?” Christmas traditions are the leftovers of the sacred. Trifle with them at your peril.

Strictly has failed to find its feet

Despite what Len Goodman says, Saturday is not shaping up to be the best Strictly Come Dancing final ever. I can’t remember a year when I cared less who wins.

It’s not the fact that it’s an all-female contest; the Strictly magic has gone missing. The music has been guilty of trying too hard to get down with the kids. Even worse, it has often been tricky to dance to.

Quite simply, there have been too few of those planet-realigning moments, such as when Darren Gough, winner of Series 3, moved from burly, trainer-wearing cricketer to ballroom twinkletoes.

It hasn’t helped that the glorious Flavia and Vincent have been absent, with firm favourites such as Erin, Karen and Ian banished off screen.

This year’s best celebrity dancer is Natalie Gumede. Trouble is, no one much wants to vote for Natalie because she was practically professional standard from Week One. It’s what you might call the Denise Van Outen problem. Can someone whose CV actually states that she is a highly competent dancer really be crowned Queen of Strictly?

The most popular contestant, and the bookies’ favourite, is Susanna Reid. The BBC Breakfast anchor gives marvellously gutsy performances, but even Susanna, I suspect, would admit that she is not really a talented enough dancer to win.

That leaves Abbey Clancy, who seems to be the judges’ darling and has been overmarked, even when she’s made errors; and the singer Sophie Ellis-Bextor, who has been undermarked, even when she hasn’t.

I reckon Sophie’s Charleston was the dance of the series, but she hasn’t done anything else quite as dazzling, and often looks like a stricken Bambi away from the guiding arms of Brendan Cole.

In short, there is no clear winner. Except Bruce Forsyth, who has signed up to host the next season of Strictly, despite the minor problem of being unable to read his script and having referred to the beauteous Darcey Bussell as “Dave”.

I will be tuning in for the final but, as a Strictly devotee, I hope the show finds its feet again next year.

Doris from Swindon is my festive favourite

Honestly, how much revelling in nostalgia for Sixties and Seventies bad-boys do we have to put up with? ITV has already given us a two-part drama about Lord Lucan. Why actors of the stature of Rory Kinnear and Christopher Eccleston wasted their talent on a bunch of toxic toffs is a mystery deeper even than Lucan’s disappearance.

Now, over the season of goodwill to all men forsooth, we have not one but two BBC films dramatising the 1963 Great Train Robbery. One film, screened last night, was from the perspective of its perpetrators; the other, which will be shown tonight, from that of the coppers who pursued them. How about the mail train’s point of view? Surely they could have squeezed another series out of that?

As if on cue, Ronnie Biggs died yesterday, leading to yet more coverage of what the BBC called a “folkloric raid”. Or a bunch of criminals who nicked £2.6 million, as they should properly be described.

I couldn’t give a damn about Biggs, and resent him being treated as a latter-day Robin Hood. So let us turn to someone genuinely worthy of attention this Yuletide. Like Doris from Swindon.

Hand in Hand for Syria, a London-based charity focused on bringing help to Syrians in terrible, bitterly cold conditions, reports that a 92-year-old lady called Doris has knitted 400 sweaters (see picture) to send to Syrian children.

I don’t have a full name for Doris, but I do know that, in her practical and beautiful reaction to that crisis, she embodies the spirit of Christmas.

This is my last column before the new year, so here’s hoping that you and yours have a lovely, peaceful holiday. Happy Christmas.